Cool Water by Dianne Warren Read Free Book Online

the drive-in, but immediately lost them again. He thought because she was a camel she’d probably headed for the sand hills, so he borrowed an old horse from Lester Torgeson and spent several days riding through the grass – lands and dunes searching for signs of Antoinette. He found the odd track, but nothing more. He couldn’t believe she could disappear. The Little Snake Hills, after all, were not as expansive as a desert like the Sahara or the Gobi. Willard got numerous anonymous tips telling him Antoinette had been spotted masquerading as the rodeo queen in Maple Creek, or Antoinette had fallen in love with a camel in a travelling circus and was now following it from town to town in a love-sick fever. Harmless jokes, and Willard accepted them in good spirit even though he missed his camel.
    In a way, Antoinette figured into Ed’s death. A good number of years had passed since Antoinette’s disappearance, and Willard’s cactus sign was still standing in the ditch, annoying Ed. One spring day Willard found Ed in his hip waders, standing in the ditch with a crowbar, and they had a brotherly quarrel. Willard argued that the cactus was a monument to Antoinette and a bit of a local curiosity, a landmark that would be missed if Ed destroyed it, but he knew this was a fight he wasn’t going to win, so he went to town for the mail. When Willard came home and saw the sign still up, he knew something was wrong. As he drove alongside the sign, he saw Ed face down in the ditch. He’d had a heart attack while trying to pry the sign out of the still-frozen mud under the spring runoff.
    After Ed was buried, people wondered, like Willard, what Marian would do. She kept to herself as she always had, but sometimes in the summer that followed Ed’s death she sold tickets or drinks at the drive-in. Because Willard was liked, people who knew him hoped that a love affair would develop between him and Marian, but it never had. Willard kept the cactus sign and changed the words to read, desert drive-in: see the movies the way god meant you to. One Christmas he’d gotten the idea to decorate the cactus with Christmas lights. He did an elaborate job, stringing the green lights so they followed exactly the contour of the cactus, and using white lights to represent the cactus needles, and he even created a pink cactus flower. Most people in the district now look forward to the night when Willard hangs the lights and illuminates the cactus. It marks the onset of the Christmas season more so than the decorating of the Christmas tree in the small foyer of the United church. It gives Willard pleasure that people, especially the kids, like his cactus. After he decorates it, he lies in bed at night and imagines a whole ditch full of cacti, but he never gets around to building and decorating more than the one, just like he’d never got around to buying more than one camel. And apparently Marian likes the decorated cactus even though it was the immediate cause of her husband’s death. She told Willard once, “I do like your Christmas cactus. Much easier to bring into bloom than a real one.”
    Those had been a lot of words for Marian. One of the things Willard appreciated about Marian right from the start was her apparent lack of any need to chatter, and her ability to communicate without talking. Her gestures, her expressions, even the attitude in her walk, all made sense to Willard. Within days of her moving into the house, they exchanged their first glance at Ed’s expense, which they continued to do over the years for their own pleasure, without Ed having the slightest clue. Ed was their common denominator, and Willard’s and Marian’s glances implied both tolerance and affection for a man who could summon passion when not much was at stake, but wouldn’t know how to give a compliment to save his life. They both understood Ed even though, to this day, they haven’t really talked